I Won't Forgive What You Did (8 page)

There were some cows in the yard, and in the field with the horses, and Daniel leaned on the gate to stand and watch them, pointing and laughing. He kept looking down at me and then lifted me up and sat me down carefully on the gate. I leaned towards him because it felt as if I was going to fall off backwards. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said gently. ‘I won’t let you fall.’

He hugged me then, tightly, my face in his jumper, and then his mouth was touching mine and then his teeth, and then his tongue – he started pushing it down my throat, and it choked me. ‘We haven’t got much time,’ he said. ‘Someone might come. And then we wouldn’t be able to be together, would we?’

I said nothing. I was still trying to get my breath back. ‘You know I love you,’ he went on. ‘Don’t you?’ And then he undid his trousers. ‘Look,’ he said, pulling out his enormous great thing. ‘Look what you do to me, you little minx.’

I’d seen his thing many, many times before, but seeing it again never felt any less shocking. The feelings of badness welled up, unstoppably, inside me, and I felt like the worst girl in the world. But
why
did I feel like this? Daniel loved me so much.
Really
loved me. Thinking this, I felt guilty, as I always did once he’d got his thing out, because I wasn’t sure if I wanted Daniel to
really
love me. Not like this.

He watched me all the time as he slowly touched his thing. He was touching it up and down, his breathing growing louder, his face going redder. I felt scared and muddled, mixed up. I didn’t want to watch. I closed my eyes.

‘Look at me! Come on!’ he whispered, his voice all raggedy now. ‘Look at me!’ So I opened my eyes and he was staring straight at me. He stared at me all the time and, without looking down, I knew he was still touching his thing.

He lifted me off the gate then, all of a sudden, and I knew I would either have to touch his thing too, or, instead, he would put it in my mouth. I definitely didn’t want it in my mouth, because of all the things he made me do I hated that the most. I began to feel nauseous and panicky. Just knowing what would happen made my legs start to tremble and I wanted to start running but my feet wouldn’t move. Daniel was still watching my face – his eyes never once wavered – and he bent down, took my hand and placed it inside his own, on his thing, and started to move it up and down again. He started slowly, then he began moving both our hands really fast, and stuff came out of the end really quickly. It was warm, and it ran down the back of my hand, seeping all in between my fingers. I started crying then and, as ever, I couldn’t stop.

‘Don’t cry’ Daniel said, stroking my hair. ‘I
love
you. You mustn’t cry, you hear me?’ He put his thing away and linked his hand once again in mine. ‘This is a happy time, and you’re a
very
special girl.’

As ever, I felt sad, sick and very bad when Daniel left, and those feelings would persist for many days. But eventually they’d fade, and it wouldn’t be too many weeks before I was once again longing for his return.

My day-to-day existence, however, had no such highs and lows. I clung to my mother at all times. Not only did I find it really hard to be separated from her, I also felt responsible for her. Not surprising, given what I now understand about her condition, but at the time it was more a direct, if unknowing, response to it. As I got older, her indifference, bizarre behaviour, and neglect, made my attempts to engage with her ever more desperate.

Though I was also, at all times, on guard with her, because I never knew what to expect. Her mood, always unpredictable, could turn in a heartbeat. My younger sister, for example, since she was tiny had always hated having her hair washed. By now she was eight, and would always protest loudly when beckoned to her turn at the kitchen sink. She’d start crying and, by the time my mother got hold of her, dragged her over and pushed her head under the tap, the crying would turn to screams. She’d scream all the time her hair was being washed, while my mother shouted: ‘If you don’t stop that bloody noise, I will give you something to cry about.’ But one day, my mother was more canny. She called my sister, put an arm around her, bent down and whispered, ‘I have a very special present for you, and if you are a good girl, and don’t make a fuss when I wash your hair, you shall have it.’

I watched my little sister’s anxious face turn to a smile, and how quietly and meekly she stood over the sink. Then, of course, as my mother towel-dried her hair, my sister wanted to know when she could have it. ‘I’ve been a good girl,’ she said. ‘Haven’t I?’ To which my mother replied, ‘Yes.’ But then she spun her around – it all happened in the blink of an eye – and started hitting her really hard, all over her body – the backs of her legs, her arms and her bottom, all the while shouting: ‘There you are, there’s your present, you little cow! I’ll bloody teach you to play me up! Don’t you ever cry again when I’m washing your hair!’

I could hardly bear watching this, the shock left me bewildered. And then angry – such cruelty – I wished she was
dead –
and then guilt that I’d done nothing to help my sister.

By now, my mother had ruined our lovely home. It seemed to happen almost overnight. The chaos and filth had returned, and it felt just as it had at the other house, only worse, because there were now even more rooms disgusting and full of junk.

She just couldn’t seem to stop collecting things. There were carrier bags and boxes of stuff
everywhere.
Bags hung on the door handles to every single room, stuff hung on the doors themselves, and all around them, leaving only a small walkway into each room. We could hardly ever use either the dining table or chairs as both would be covered in piles of magazines and junk. There was no place that wasn’t occupied by rubbish. In every room, under the beds, on the stairs, in every cupboard, on the landing, on the sofa, even piled high on every windowsill – her stuff was absolutely everywhere you looked. It was both terrifying and overwhelming; as if she’d spread herself everywhere, all around, in every corner, and there wasn’t even a tiny space left for the rest of us.

Being older – and, in some ways, more frightened of her behaviour, because I could observe it with more clarity – I needed to find ways to cope. Every day, in the school holidays, and weekends, after school, and when I was absent, I’d try to clean parts of the house. Our house felt more and more like an extension of my mother, and, as such, I felt this great responsibility for it as well as her. I also hoped – vainly – if I could clear up, my father would be happier and get on better with my mother. As it was, he’d be constantly shouting at her, very often now, in response to her persistent questioning of him, and accusing him of seeing his ‘whore’. ‘You won’t go to heaven,’ she’d tell him. ‘You’ll end up in hell!’ I’d started my own life under the shadow of one of his affairs; it was due to his affair with his boss’s teenage daughter that he’d lost his job and we’d had to move in the first place. His affairs would continue for many years, but in truth they were just another aspect of the misery – the central unhappiness in my life, apart from being constantly interfered with by Pops and so messed up about my feelings for Daniel, was my mother, who was getting more strange every year.

My relationship with her left me with the same sort of anxiety I’d feel when very small, when I was either left and not fed, or when I
would
have her attention, but I wouldn’t know what she might do, or how she’d be.

Washing and cleaning were my only way to ease my anxiety. I spent a lot of time washing and cleaning. My mother didn’t very often wash any bedding. Our blankets, which were black army blankets, shiny with dirt, and itchy and smelly, were far too big and heavy for me to attempt to clean. But I could do our sheets, which were equally disgusting. My little brother Jack’s, in particular, were horrible, covered in brown and black stains, and filthy from where he would habitually suck the corner. The kitchen sink was always overflowing with dirty crockery, so I’d take the bedclothes to the bathroom, put them in the bath, fill it, and then tread on them to squeeze what filth I could out of them, before taking them downstairs in a bowl and carrying them out to the garden and hanging them on the line.

The house smelled too. Winston, my mother’s ginger cat, would go to the toilet anywhere he pleased, and no one would ever clear it up. His piles of dried faeces – particularly under the beds – remained there indefinitely and made me feel sick. I would try to clear them up, but they made me retch and retch. My mother had also acquired a dog. He was a Jack Russell, and was constantly tormented by my father. He spent most of his time tied to a chair leg in the kitchen, because if let loose he’d bite anyone who came to the house, start barking, and never stop.

My mother’s menagerie outside had grown as well. The sheer quantity of animals in the garden was breathtaking. What had started with a little collection of small animals and birds had grown – as they were free to mingle with each other as they wanted – to a collection of over a hundred rabbits, a similar number of guinea pigs, many hens, and a cockerel. She seemed better at and more happy caring for these than her increasing offspring of human dependants.

The rabbits and guinea pigs were in two big cages, balanced on a wooden stand my father had made. It leaned against the side of the house, opposite a chicken house and run. When we walked home from school we picked dandelions, hogweed and other greenery for the rabbits and guinea pigs to eat. The chickens had scraps of food we left, plus grain from the cattle markets my father went to. My mother collected their eggs every day. I can’t remember us children being allowed to. We were, however – and in particular my sister – expected to clear out the guinea pigs’ and rabbits’ poo. As my mother only dealt with it rarely, it’d pile up in big heaps in their cages.

My father sometimes brought home farm animals, too, to fatten up for market. Pigs, lambs, sheep, even a Shetland pony on one occasion – all of which shared space with the junk that was also out there: old cars, piles of wood, logs, old tin cans, discarded oil drums and an old pick-up truck, that became his workbench for sawing logs.

In the orchard next to the house there were a couple of sows (plus their piglets) who would chase us and bite us if they managed to catch up with us when we climbed over the fence to scrump apples. We’d often be stuck up the trees, sometimes for what seemed like hours, as they wouldn’t move far enough to enable us to climb down again and run safely back to our garden.

The business of feeding her human family seemed more complicated for my mother. She cooked, but as with everything she seemed unable to grasp the nature of the whole. Nothing was ever cleaned. The cooker’s top, sides and front were permanently covered in black grease, as were the walls around and the floor in front of the cooker, as well as the green Formica table that stood next to it. My mother fried food every day. Unless he was to be gone early, at say, four, she’d cook breakfast for my father – sausages, bacon, eggs, a boiled pork chop, tomatoes, bread and butter and tea. My mother said he needed the good food because he was out working, earning the money to keep us.

Once she’d fed him, and he’d gone, my mother would often take up her position on her chair in front of the Rayburn. She’d have the Rayburn door open and be reading a magazine, ripping bits out of it as she did so and dropping them onto the floor beside her. These bits of paper were the genesis of much of the chaos that spilled out into every room of the house. She’d be still in her dressing gown, unwashed, her hair messy, and would very often stay there till lunchtime. I found the sight of my mother at such times hard to bear. I wanted to scream at her: ‘Why don’t you
do
something?’ but at the same time I felt desperately sorry for her too, and guilty for all the bad thoughts she’d make me have wondering why she couldn’t be like other girls’ mothers: laughing and kind, and just somehow more alive.

I’d start clearing up then, clearing the remains of my father’s delicious breakfast, and wondering why he had food we didn’t. And then I’d feel guilty again, because he did go to work, and he did earn all the money, and if he didn’t then we’d probably all be dead.

But the filth in the kitchen didn’t just come from his breakfasts; my mother cooked chips for us almost every night. We lived on chips most of the time, it seemed. Sometimes we’d have stews, made from scrag ends of meat, or mince, or liver my father got from the slaughterhouse for nothing, and sometimes a pie or toad in the hole. This, however, depended on how she was feeling. Sometimes too, in the school holidays, if she was feeling energetic, she’d make a jam pudding and custard and would actually sit down with us while we were eating. But then she’d start telling us her jokes about people weeing and pooing and ‘blowing off’. She’d laugh so much there’d be tears rolling down her cheeks. It was one of the very few things that seemed to make her animated – slightly hysterical even – and, caught up in this, we’d laugh too.

She didn’t often spend time washing up anything, and the two big metal chip pans made the whole kitchen smell horrible. She’d cook them in batches, and great bouts of smoke would billow around, seeping into every last corner of the house. She often had chip pan fires, which terrified me while she ran in a frenzy, trying to put them out. I’d sometimes attempt to clean the disgusting pans myself, carefully straining the fat from them through a tea strainer into a jug, and throwing away all the ancient black bits. I’d then attempt to scrub them, but it never worked. They stayed black and would never come clean.

I’d also try to wash up, but there was so much dirty crockery in the sink I couldn’t even turn the taps on properly. And it was never just piled in the sink either. The kitchen table, the yellow cupboard and the red kitchen cabinet would almost always be covered in crockery and pans of congealed, rotting food, some of which would have green mildew up the sides. There would even be piles of dirty saucepans stacked on the floor, sometimes with remains I could clearly identify – the green beans, for example, Pops had brought the previous Saturday. He still brought my mother vegetables when he came, because if he didn’t we’d hardly have any. The only other veg we ever seemed to have were the potatoes, cabbage and swedes my mother said my father used to pinch sometimes from where they were on sale on the trailer parked up the road.